Multilingualism in English as a lingua franca: Flagging as an indicator of perceived acceptability and intelligibility

Lingua franca interactions are inherently multilingual; speakers’ first and other languages are always implicitly present in such interactions. However, the extent to which speakers resort to their multilingual resources depends on how acceptable and understandable they expect these resources to be with particular interlocutors or within particular speech situations. In this chapter, we draw on the multilingual practices observable in the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA 2008) to generalise to other practices which can be treated as similar from the perspective of perceived acceptability and intelligibility. With this aim in mind, we focus on elements tagged as <FOREIGN> in the corpus – that is, elements recognised as code-switches by the corpus compilers – and investigate the lexico-grammatical regularities in their co-text. Using both corpus linguistic and micro analytic methods, we show that speakers use these regularities to flag potentially problematic items, including but not limited to code-switches. In this way we extend our scope beyond elements which have traditionally been regarded as multilingual. We expect this research to contribute to the development of corpus linguistic methods in studying elements perceived as “foreign” and thus potentially problematic in the discourse.